UC Santa Cruz

In southern Brazil, a traditional farming system called faxinal has also worked to preserve forests. Under pressures for intensified production, some communities have transitioned into a land-use system governed exclusively by a private property regime, while others have resisted such pressures and still have the main feature of the faxinal as a communal area, covered mainly by forest, used for livestock farming. In this research I ask two questions: What factors favor a faxinal to resist pressures to abandon the model and move towards a more conventional, private property model? Do traditional faxinal do a better job preserving forest than places where the faxinal model has been abandoned or never even existed? In chapter 1, I used a social-ecological resilience framework and the literature on common-poll resource (CPR) governance to analyze data on local institutions and land management practices communities of faxinal. I described (1) local institutional arrangements and cooperation mechanisms that foster forest conservation in the faxinal, (2) internal and external challenges to cooperation and rule enforcement, and (3) ways in which the system copes with the disturbances and adapt. In chapter 2, I move to landscape scale of analysis to look at changes in forest cover over time in communities of faxinal across a large geographical range. Here I demonstrated that the faxinal have worked for securing forest cover. However, the high rates of deforestation in the region are an important threat for both the local forest and the faxinal and I recommend conservation strategies to focus on supporting this system’s institutional arrangements and land management strategies that foster forest conservation. Finally, on chapter 3 I scale-down to the forest plot to look at the effect of the local governance strategies of the faxinal on forest diversity and resilience. My results showed that the faxinal traditional governance translates into higher diversity, especially in the forest regenerative strata, and into the maintenance of forest fragments that have key characteristics presented in the literature as features that define the structure and composition of the local forest.